Old World, New Ideas

Kevin Goldberg

Kevin D. Goldberg began collecting European coins as a Middle School student in suburban Philadelphia. Three decades later, he still collects European coins, but now in suburban Atlanta, where he teaches in the Department of History & Philosophy at Kennesaw State University. He earned his Ph.D. in European History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the International Humanities at Brown University, 2011-2013. Kevin has been planning on expanding his collection beyond Europe for the past decade, but is only now getting around to it.

File under Holstein-Gottorp-Rendsburg or Holsten-Gottorp-Rendsborg?

As
time ticked down in a recent auction, and I suspected that my bid
would win, my mind turned immediately to an impending mini-crisis of
classification. Is this pair of
18th-centuryHolstein-Gottorp-Rendsburg coins German or
Danish? The frontier between Germany and Denmark had been hotly
contested for centuries, and the small state of
Holstein-Gottorp-Rendsburg (Holsten-Gottorp-Rendsborg in Danish)
shared traits of both. Had this question only been academic, I would
have hardly batted an eye, but this was about something more
important than geopolitics or scholarly pedantry; this was about
real problems for coin collectors…this was about choosing the proper
album for storing these coins for the long term.

Organization
is both a bane and pleasure of numismatics. Whether we use albums,
folders, boxes, or some other contraption, we all rely on some form
of organizational tool to help us enjoy the hobby. But what happens,
as it so often does, when coins seem to fit into two (or more!)
categories that we use to organize our collection? With separate
albums for Germany and Denmark, how do I decide where to place these
coins,which, truly, are German and Danish?

I
decided to share my thought process here in this forum, hoping to
solicit feedback on your own strategies when this or similar dilemmas
arise.

The
case for Germany: The
territory in question is located in what is today Germany. Though
passed back and forth for centuries, the town of Rendsburg is now a
sleepy hamlet of almost 30,000 in the northern-German state of
Schleswig-Holstein. Within the hobby, there really is no separate
niche for Danish states. Rather, these territories on the
German-Danish frontier are almost always lumped into the much larger
German states category. To strengthen the case further, the
well-respected international dealer who hosted the auction sold the
pair as German.

The
case for Denmark: Holsten-Gottorp-Rendsborg
was a territory of the Danish king, Frederick IV. Asa result of the
Great Northern War, Denmark had established dominance in the region,
and had stripped less powerful German and Swedish princes of their
territory. The coins themselves also tell a story…and the story they
tell is in Danish. With the monogram of Frederick IV on the obverse
and “I Skilling Danske” on the reverse, there is little room for
doubting their Danish provenance.

While
this dilemma offers some nice food for thought for numismatists, the
so-called “Schleswig-Holstein” question had perplexed observers for
a very long time. Speaking in the 1860s, the British Prime Minister
Lord Palmerston purportedly remarked about the true nature of this
territory: “Only three people have ever really understood the
Schleswig-Holstein business—the [Danish] Prince Consort, who is
dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten
all about it.” It’s no wonder then that I should struggle so
mightily to determine the fate of these otherwise delightful coins
in my collection.

I’m
curious to know what strategies you use to organize coins that may
fit many niches in your collection.

This entry was posted on Tue Oct 27 19:13:25 EDT 2015. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed.